All three countries are in a bad state. The beneficiary, of a sort, will be Russia

IT IS not a new iron curtain yet, but the dividing line looks increasingly solid all the same. Though democracy and the market have put down deep roots in much of ex-communist Europe, the three republics that once formed the western flank of the Soviet Union are plunging deeper into a spiral of authoritarianism and decay. After a decade of independence, this unhappy trio—Ukraine (population 50m), Belarus (10m) and Moldova (4.7m)—are a shambles. Russia is picking up the pieces.

There have been two big upheavals this year. One was a victory for the old guard in Moldova, the poorest country in Europe and now the only one ruled by unabashed Communists. The other came in Ukraine, after a long period of political ferment, and mounting protest against President Leonid Kuchma over the murder of a muck-raking journalist: the recent removal of the prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, the three countries' only professed pro-western and reformist political leader.

The third country, Belarus, has long been on the wrong track. Since taking power in 1994, its erratic, high-handed leader, Alexander Lukashenka, has frozen ties with the West, shut down the press, suppressed opposition parties and created a heavily-controlled, lopsided economic system that pays wages less than a tenth of those in next-door Poland.

In the cold war, the iron curtain demarcated communism and Soviet hegemony. A different threat is posed by the new “misery curtain”, caused by social breakdown and corrupt, incompetent governments: smuggling—often with the connivance of senior officials—of migrants, drugs, sex slaves and weapons, and the spread of organised crime and infectious diseases.

From bad to worse

A nasty outbreak of internal blood-letting occurred in Moldova in 1992. The Communist victory there has brought peace, of a sort, nearer. An ethnic Russian himself, the new president, Vladimir Voronin, has offered two large sops to the Russian-speaking separatists who have set up their own, self-proclaimed (and self-corrupted) state, Transdniestria, in the east of the country. He has proposed giving the Russian language official status in the whole republic, along with Romanian, the tongue of the majority. And he has suggested teaming Moldova up with the Russia-Belarus union, a ramshackle arrangement in which Russia trades energy for influence.

That link, he says, would reassure the Transdniestrian population that no future Moldovan government would seek union with Romania. The winding-up of Transdniestria would cause few tears except to its inventors. But there is little in Mr Voronin's economic programme to suggest that a reunited Moldova would live any better than a disunited one. After some hiccups, his bid for reconciliation with Transdniestria and its veteran strongman, Igor Smirnov, seems to be making progress. But his talk of snuggling up to Belarus suggests that Moldovans may soon be marching together in just the wrong direction.

If Moldova is a headache, Ukraine is a nightmare. It is the largest country in Eastern Europe outside Russia, and its success or failure affects the whole region. With Mr Yushchenko gone and the opposition split, the Kremlin—and Russian big business—look set to be the biggest beneficiary of the change. President Vladimir Putin has named a Russian former prime minister, and gas magnate, Viktor Chernomyrdin, as his ambassador to Ukraine, with the task of “strengthening economic ties”—a mandate that sounds, to Ukrainian ears, like tightening the screws on a country already over-dependent on Russian oil and gas.

Taras Chornovil, a doughty opposition parliamentarian, calls the appointment a “full stop in Ukraine's economic independence”. No one in Kiev minds Russian trade and investment as such; but the worry is that Kremlin-backed industrialists have been buying up Ukrainian industry on the cheap, with political influence part of the bargain. Mr Yushchenko's government had tried to stop this takeover. Now it can go ahead more easily. Mr Kuchma's choice as the new prime minister, Anatoly Kinakh, a loyal ally whose nomination narrowly squeaked through the parliament on May 29th, is best known as a business lobbyist. The issue will be whose business: though he promised further economic reform, the murky political climate is unattractive to westerners who might have given Russian investors a run for their money.

In Belarus, the loudly proclaimed love of Mr Lukashenka for his Slavic brothers in Moscow seems to have been spurned. The Kremlin looks as if it is preparing to support his rival in elections later this year, and it is also tightening the financial screws—apparently hoping for a new economic bargain that leaves Russia in control of its neighbour's lucrative potash industry and bits of the energy industry. In any event, Mr Putin seems to find his counterpart embarrassing and unreliable.

Russian influence

In another hint of Russia's resurgent influence, its largest political party, Unity, is surfacing in various parts of the ex-Soviet periphery—not least in Transdniestria, where its slick advertising and well-financed, well-equipped and well-guarded offices are undermining Mr Smirnov and his rival variety of pro-Russian loyalism. Unity is encouraging people in Transdniestria to take out Russian citizenship—an option that has also been touted in Georgia's pro-Russian statelets of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, other places where the legal government does not govern.

Is Russia's resurgent influence part of a consciously planned strategy, or merely an opportunistic bid to capitalise in various ways on the failure of its western neighbours to consolidate their statehood? Neither thesis can be proved or disproved. A cynical Ukrainian politician argues that there is no need to invoke dark Kremlin plots to explain his country's travails: “We are quite capable of committing national self-annihilation by ourselves.”

Nor, at least until recently, has it been clear which forces in the three western republics' dramas were acting as stalking-horses for the Kremlin. In Moldova, neither President Voronin nor Mr Smirnov seems to enjoy unequivocal favour in the Kremlin, for all their pro-Russian talk. And in Belarus Mr Lukashenka's declared loyalty to Russia has plainly not been reciprocated.

What can be said, though, is that wherever Russia has had a choice between backing authoritarian forces and more democratic or market-oriented ones, it has usually opted for the former. In Belarus, for example, the Kremlin has shielded Mr Lukashenka, little as it may like him, from western protests about human rights. In Ukraine, it forced the sacking last year of an abrasively pro-western foreign minister, and Mr Putin vigorously defended President Kuchma during the wave of protests over the journalist's death.

Nor, whatever the uneven results of western aid in the region, is it likely that closer ties with Russia will make the affected countries any more prosperous. The places behind the misery curtain where Russian influence is strongest—Transdniestria and Belarus, notably—are also the most miserable.